Lead Data Scientist at Ecolab Saint Paul, MN

Ecolab; Saint Paul (MN); Hybrid; USD 154,000 - 231,000; Full time

Job summary

Ecolab Digital is seeking a Lead Data Scientist to drive AI product development across ML and LLM-based applications for the Institutional & Specialty segment. You will own end-to-end AI solution design, development, and production lifecycle, partnering with marketing, sales, and engineering to deliver measurable commercial outcomes.

The role is hybrid in St. Paul, MN or Naperville, IL with up to 10% travel. Strong background in Python/SQL, Databricks, and GenAI is essential to succeed.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Data Science, Economics, Math, Statistics or related field with analytics emphasis or a master's with 5+ years progressive data experience.

Responsibilities

• Identify opportunities aligned to Institutional & Specialty business challenges.
• Drive experimentation and delivery of digital data science and AI product innovations.
• Partner with stakeholders to translate strategy and VOC into technical opportunities and lifecycle decisions.
• Architect and build AI solutions end-to-end across ML and LLM-based applications and multi-agent systems.
• Own production lifecycle of AI agents and models including QA, monitoring, drift detection, and retraining pipelines.

Skills

Python

SQL

PySpark

LLM

Multi-agent systems

GenAI

Education

Bachelor's degree in Data Science or related field

Tools

Databricks GenAI Stack

Databricks

Git

Job description

Ecolab Digital is seeking a commercial solution focused Lead Data Scientist to unlock the value in data assets while creating maturing and maintaining unique offerings for customers in the Institutional & Specialty segment. In this role you will sit at the intersection of AI engineering and data science. Youll be partnering with digital product marketing sales and engineering teams to design build and ship intelligent solutions that drive measurable commercial outcomes. You will own the end-to-end execution of AI product development across classical ML LLM-based applications and multi-agent/agentic workflows translating business strategy into production-grade systems that scale.

Position Details

St. Paul MN or Naperville IL with a hybrid schedule. Up to 10% of the time.

What you will do

• Identify and define opportunities aligned to Institutional & Specialty business challenges navigating a wide range of problems and solution approaches.
• Drive experimentation and delivery of digital data science and AI product innovations aligned to the overall digital product vision.
• Partner with a broad range of internal business stakeholders to translate business strategy and VOC into technical opportunities builds and lifecycle decisions communicating clearly and consistently at every level.
• Architect and build AI solutions end to end across classical ML LLM-based applications and multi-agent systems. You will own the technical design decisions from the data layer through inference API exposure and product integration.
• Own the production lifecycle of AI agents and models. This covers QA monitoring drift detection prompt and version management and retraining pipelines so we ship outcomes that are reliable and credible in customer-facing products.
• Define and track effectiveness metrics for AI features in partnership with product and commercial teams.
• Design evaluation frameworks with built-in responsible AI practices. This includes champion/challenger pipelines automated regression testing guardrails and audit logging.

Minimum Qualifications

• Bachelors Degree in Data Science Economics Math Statistics or related field with an emphasis on analytics or masters degree with 5 years of experience in progressive data roles. 8 years of experience 5 years of strong Python and SQL. Expert in writing clean modular production-grade code and treating version control unit testing and code review as standard practice.
• 1 years shipping production LLM applications: prompt engineering as a real discipline (structured prompts output schemas exclusion rules) RAG over vector indexes and combining GenAI reasoning with deterministic logic for reliable auditable outputs.
• Hands-on experience building and orchestrating multi-agent systems including sequential handoffs tool-calling and scheduled or DAG-based workflows with good judgment on when to use probabilistic reasoning versus deterministic rules.
• Proven experience building and running evaluation and quality frameworks for GenAI output. You can measure whether a prompt or model change actually made things better calibrate against subject-matter-expert ground truth and keep hallucinations in check in customer-facing products.
• Experience with being a people manager.
• Proven ability to balance practical business needs with technical rigor and to clearly explain your approach assumptions and tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Excellent communication and presentation skills. You can translate technical work into business context and deliver structured concise findings to a wide range of stakeholders.
• Hands-on experience with PySpark and DataFrame APIs on a large-scale distributed platform (Databricks strongly preferred) and experience governing data pipelines that pull real-world sources (operational regulatory sensor/IoT third-party) into one coherent data model.
• Immigration sponsorship is not available for this position.

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep familiarity with the Databricks GenAI stack: Model Serving Unity Catalog Vector Search MLflow (incl. prompt registry and champion/challenger evaluation) Lakebase/managed PostgreSQL and Databricks Asset Bundles.
• Experience with MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers and tools conversational AI assistants and emerging agent-to-agent (A2A) orchestration patterns.
• Experience exposing AI capabilities as production services and APIs and integrating them into customer-facing digital products with attention to latency reliability versioning and auth.
• Proficiency across the Microsoft Azure suite (App Service Functions Key Vault ADO Pipelines) and PowerBI and comfort with cloud APIs and CI/CD across multiple environments.
• Solid data science foundation that carries into GenAI work: EDA statistical reasoning metrics and eval design sampling and error analysis.
• Working knowledge of DevOps git Snowflake and distributed compute platforms.
• Experience in Retail/Quick Service Restaurants businesses.
• Well-developed and proven leadership strategic thinking & business acumen.
• Sharing a public GitHub profile or project portfolio is encouraged; wed love to see examples of your hands-on work where available.

Annual or Hourly Compensation Range

The base salary range for this position is $153900.00 - $230800.00. This position is eligible for annual bonus pay based on performance per plan terms. Many factors are taken into consideration when determining compensation such as experience education training geography etc. We comply with all minimum wage and overtime laws.

Benefits

• Ecolab strives to provide comprehensive and market-competitive benefits to meet the needs of our associates and their families.

Customer Requirements Notice

• To meet customer requirements and comply with local or state regulations applicants for certain customer-facing roles may need to: Undergo additional background screens and/or drug/alcohol testing for customer credentialing.
• Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) Ecolab will provide reasonable accommodation (such as a qualified sign language interpreter or other personal assistance) with our application process upon request as required to comply with applicable laws. If you have a disability and require accommodation assistance in this application process please visit the Recruiting Support link in the footer of each page of our career website.

Required Experience

Senior IC